Michelle starred as a married woman who fell in love with her next door neighbor in this year's Take This Waltz, and tells the magazine the flick's character was "on the verge" of womanhood.

"I thought about [this movie] as a coming-of-age story. Not in the pubescent way, but a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, of that transition that you make in your late 20s or early 30s," she said. "She’s yet to experience a great kind of sadness. And I think that that’s the thing that kind of plants her into adulthood.”

One wonders if Michelle might be alluding to the great sadness she experienced at 27 when her ex, Heath Ledger, the father of her daughter, Matilda, died from an accidental drug overdose.

Michelle has been happier in recent months with her newfound romance with comedic actor and writer Jason Segel. Judging from what she told Flare, Jason's got more in his bag of tricks than pure niceness.

“You deserve more than just somebody who’s nice to you," she said. "I think that so often these days, niceness seems like it should be enough because it seems like such a rare quality, but when you get inside of it, you think, ‘Hmmm… I can be pretty nice to myself.’ What about these other things? Life is too short and too crappy to not try to get more of what you want.”

Michelle's next movie is director Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, co-starring James Franco, Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz.